Mental reality / Galen Strawson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Strawson, Galen.

Series:

Representation and mind.

Representation and mind series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Consciousness.

Behaviorism (Psychology).

Mind and body.

Materialism.

Philosophy of mind.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xx, 373 p.) : ill.

Edition:

2nd ed., with a new appendix.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

"In Mental reality, Galen Strawson argues that much contemporary philosophy of mind gives undue primacy of place to publicly observable phenomena, nonmental phenomena, and behavioral phenomena (understood as publicly observable phenomena) in its account of the nature of mind. It does so at the expense of the phenomena of conscious experience. Strawson describes an alternative position, "naturalized Cartesianism," which couples the materialist view that mind is entirely natural and wholly physical with a fully realist account of the nature of conscious experience. Naturalized Cartesianism is an adductive (as opposed to reductive) form of materialism. Adductive materialists don't claim that conscious experience is anything less than we ordinarily conceive it to be, in being wholly physical. They claim instead that the physical is something more than we ordinarily conceive it to be, given that many of the wholly physical goings on in the brain constitute--literally are--conscious experiences as we ordinarily conceive them. Since naturalized Cartesianism downgrades the place of reference to nonmental and publicly observable phenomena in an adequate account of mental phenomena, Strawson considers in detail the question of what part such reference still has to play. He argues that it is a mistake to think that all behavioral phenomena are publicly observable phenomena. This revised and expanded edition of Mental Reality includes a new appendix, which thoroughly revises the account of intentionality given in chapter 7"--MIT CogNet.

Contents:

A default position

Experience

The character of experience

Understanding-experience

A note about dispositional mental states

Purely experiential content

An account of four seconds of thought

Questions

The mental and the nonmental

The mental and the publicly observable

The mental and the behavioral

Neobehaviorism and reductionism

Naturalism in the philosophy of mind

Conclusion: The three questions

Agnostic materialism, part 1

Monism

The linguistic argument

Materialism and monism

A comment on reduction

The impossibility of an objective phenomenology

Asymmetry and reduction

Equal-status monism

Panpsychism

The inescapability of metaphysics

Agnostic materialism, part 2

Ignorance

Sensory spaces

Experience, explanation, and theoretical integration

The hard part of the mind-body problem

Neutral monism and agnostic monism

A comment on eliminativism, instrumentalism, and so on

Mentalism, idealism, and immaterialism

Mentalism

Strict or pure process idealism

Active-principle idealism

Stuff idealism

Immaterialism

The positions restated

The dualist options

Frege's thesis

Objections to pure process idealism

The problem of mental dispositions

Mental

Shared abilities

The sorting ability

The definition of mental being

Mental phenomena

The view that all mental phenomena are experiential phenomena

Natural intentionality

E/c intentionality

The experienceless

Intentionality and abstract and nonexistent objects

Experience, purely experiential content, and n/c intentionality

Concepts in nature

Intentionality and experience

Summary with problem

Pain and pain

The neo-behaviorist view

A linguistic argument for the necessary connection between pain and behavior

A challenge

The Sirians

N.N. Novel

An objection to the Sirians

The Betelgeuzians

The point of the Sirians

Functionalism, naturalism, and realism about pain

Unpleasantness and qualitative character

The weather watchers

The rooting story

What is it like to be a weather watcher?

The aptitudes of mental states

The argument from the conditions for possessing the concept of space

The argument from the conditions for language ability

The argument from the nature of desire

Desire and affect

The argument from the phenomenology of desire

Behavior

A hopeless definition

Difficulties

Other-observability

Neo-behaviorism

The concept of mind.

Notes:

OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

"A Bradford book."

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0-262-26447-1

1-282-69477-4

9786612694776

0-262-25922-2

OCLC:

503092562

Publisher Number:

9786612694776

9780262259224